Dr Ruth Pye in the labs at the Menzies Research Institute in Hobart. She has successfully treated canine tumours and hopes the treatment can help devil facial tumour research.Source: News Limited

DOGS are offering faint hope that the deadly Tasmanian devil facial tumour could evolve into a less deadly form.

Canines are the only animals apart from Tasmanian devils which suffer from a cancer that is passed from animal to animal.

For stray dogs that run amok in many parts of India, and around Australian aboriginal settlements, the canine transmissible venereal tumour can be a painful affliction, but it does not kill.

In an evolutionary sense it would have been a mistake for the dog disease to kill its hosts too readily, because if it killed every dog it came into contact with, it would eventually die out itself.

Many successful diseases, such as influenzas, tend to moderate over time and a big question among scientists is whether the devil tumour can moderate before it drives wild devil populations extinct, or if it will continue along the path of a biological suicide bomber.

Ruth Pye, a vet and a PhD student at the Menzies Research Institute said the dog tumour – which had been around for at least 11,000 years – was easily treatable.

She said in 2012 she had successfully treated about 30 stray dogs in Ladakh, an Indian region, using the chemotherapy drug Vincristine.

Dr Pye said the tumour treatments had been a side line to her work for a Vets Beyond Borders aid program, which involved the sterilisation of about 1000 dogs, to combat the country’s rabies epidemic.

She said when she encountered dogs with tumours on their genitalia, and occasionally their noses, she had also taken biopsies and mailed them to transmissible tumour specialist Elizabeth Murchison at Cambridge University.

Dr Murchison is among the leading authorities on Tasmanian devil tumour research.

In January she made world headlines as the lead author of a scientific paper published in the journal Science, announcing the first completed sequencing of the dog tumour genome. She also led the team that sequenced the Tasmanian devil tumour genome in 2010.

Dr Pye said Dr Murchison had told her that she had ambitions to sequence large numbers of individual devil and dog tumours.

Scientists hope that such comparisons between tumours can provide further insights into the devil tumour, including its capacity to moderate.